This spring, as the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign accelerated around the country, Saraí Ortiz and her family began preparing for an immigration raid. Ortiz’s father, José, who is undocumented, started bringing “know your rights” cards to his fellow workers at Ambiance Apparel, a clothing company in LA’s fashion district. After 18 years there, he’d worked his way up to floor manager, and Ortiz said he wanted people not to live in fear. “My father took care of his co-workers,” she said.
Ortiz, 33, also works in the fashion district, and last Friday, she planned to pick José up from work so they could have lunch. But around 9 a.m., he called to say that federal agents had entered the building. He told her not to worry, saying, “I just want to let you know, whatever happens.” He’d memorized her phone number so he could call her if he was detained.
But none of that eased the shock Ortiz felt when she arrived at the warehouse, just in time to see her father zip-tied and loaded into a van.
“I was able to scream, ‘Dad!’ And he turned, he saw me, he waved at me, he smiled at me,” she said Monday morning, standing outside the building where he was detained. “That was our last interaction.” Three days later, she still hadn’t heard from him. She had no idea where he was, or what had happened to him.
José was one of dozens of immigrants rounded up last Friday as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies conducted raids around Los Angeles, from the Ambiance warehouse to a Home Depot parking lot in Westlake. Angelenos took to the streets in protest, and tensions escalated over the weekend, after Trump announced plans to call in thousands of California National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines against the wishes of state leaders. For days, the spectacle has dominated the national news: images of Waymos on fire; vendors and mariachis dancing in the streets; police officers in riot gear outside the downtown detention center, shooting tear gas at protesters and hitting them with batons.
Federal immigration agents have since expanded their operations in California, chasing farmworkers through the fields in the state’s agricultural communities and arresting people who show up for their court dates in San Francisco. Despite the administration’s insistence that it is targeting “the worst of the worst,” many of those detained have no criminal record.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, has harshly criticized Trump for the arrests of “dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.” On Monday, California sued the administration over what the state calls an unlawful and unprecedented deployment of troops. The question of whether the president was authorized to mobilize California Guardsmen remains in legal limbo.
Still, the families of those detained in the Ambiance Apparel raid said they need and expect more from state and local officials. Under California law and city policy, police are largely barred from assisting ICE with immigration enforcement. But police were present outside Ambiance Apparel that Friday afternoon, and in the streets downtown, LAPD officers have taken the lead in facing down demonstrators, shooting rubber bullets at unarmed protesters and press.
“Where’s the sanctuary California promised us, when our police department chooses to defend ICE officials instead of its own people?” a young man named Carlos Gonzalez, whose brother was detained at the warehouse, asked a group of reporters early this week.
For Ortiz and her family, the days after José’s arrest were defined by unbearable silence and uncertainty. “It has literally been the longest weekend of our lives,” she said on Monday.
After her dad was taken away, Ortiz called the number on a card provided by federal agents but got no answer. She spent the weekend reaching out to the relatives of other Ambiance workers on social media. Around two dozen men were detained — many of them members of LA’s Indigenous Zapotec community.
“Where’s the sanctuary California promised us, when our police department chooses to defend ICE officials instead of its own people?”
Elaina Jung Hee Vermeulen, a legal fellow at the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, spent hours outside LA’s Metropolitan Detention Center on Sunday, asking officers to let her speak with the men detained at Ambiance. But they ignored her requests, she said, even as police fired flash-bangs around her. “They were feet away from me,” she said. Over the course of the weekend, Vermeulen was able to meet with just one of the detainees. She learned that some had been transferred to a detention center out of state, and at least one man had already been deported.
On Monday morning, six of the families gathered for a news conference, holding up photos of their fathers, husbands and brothers. In a shaking voice, Zapotec community leader Perla Rios said the men had been secuestrado — kidnapped. Carlos Gonzalez stressed the point: “They were taken by force without any warnings,” he said, “being held without any contact to the families or lawyers. That is the definition of kidnapped.”
One by one, relatives took the mic to describe their detained family members: an older brother who loved his dog, a husband who was the sole provider for three small children, a father whose autistic toddler kept asking where he was. Many switched back and forth between past and present tense, as if already mourning loved ones who’d disappeared into detention.
Some emphasized that their relatives had no criminal record: “His only mistake has been wanting a better future for our family,” one woman said of her husband. Still, Vermeulen encouraged the crowd not to fixate on that distinction when it came to the question of due process. “Every single person deserves to have their humanity honored, whether a person has a criminal history or not,” she said.
Ortiz, a small woman in a blue LA baseball cap, spoke slowly, pausing often to collect herself. After the press conference, she described how her father had come to the U.S. from Guanajuato, Mexico, 30 years ago. During his first years in LA, money was tight; their family of five shared a cramped apartment. But José worked hard to keep them from feeling the pinch, putting in long hours at Ambiance and encouraging his kids to focus on school.
“Every single person deserves to have their humanity honored, whether a person has a criminal history or not.”
“I think that’s the hardest thing for us, because we saw him be so loyal and so responsible and just show up and just care in general about the company,” she said. Her younger brother, Christopher, nodded. “We’re talking Saturdays, sometimes even Sundays, giving 18 years of his life to this job, and to this country,” he said. “And then one morning, someone decided that he’s no longer needed. And they just took him.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles confirmed to HCN that federal agents had a warrant to enter the Ambiance warehouse Friday, telling the Associated Press that there was probable cause to conclude that the company was using fake documents for some workers. Meanwhile, an attorney for Ambiance told the AP that the company “has never created any fictitious documents for its workers.”
Last week’s events signaled the return of widespread workplace raids, which had been halted under President Joe Biden. Alongside the detained workers, prominent California union leader David Huerta was arrested at a protest outside the Ambiance building — a move that shocked and angered Democrats and labor activists. Many of those gathered outside the warehouse on Monday saw the targeting of the fashion district as intentional. It’s been “a place where immigrants have found a lifeline here in this country,” Vermeulen said.
That was true for José Ortiz, Ortiz said. When he wasn’t at work, her dad was a dedicated Catholic churchgoer and a homebody. He loved to cook for his kids, constantly looking up recipes on YouTube. Christopher, 24, lives in Minneapolis now, but said he gets frequent reports from his dad about new culinary successes: “He’ll tell me, ‘Guess what? I made this. I tried it out and it was good.’” Unable to test the dishes himself, Christopher relied on his sister to back up that assessment — and, usually, she agreed.
Ortiz called Christopher immediately after José was detained, and he caught the next flight to LA. Their younger sister lives in South Dakota, where the family had gathered just two weeks before to celebrate her college graduation. They asked her not to fly back; José had been so proud to see her graduate, and they thought he wouldn’t want her to interrupt the internship she’d just started. But now, Ortiz said, “She’s texting us, calling us: ‘What do you guys know? What can I do?’”
First and foremost, the families said, they wanted to know where their loved ones were, and to be able to speak with them. They wanted them released to pursue their cases. “This whole country boasts about being the best,” said Gonzalez, whose brother was detained. “But how can we claim that if we can’t uphold basic human rights and due process?”
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